"New Works by Jennifer Boggess" Exhibit on Display in March

Saturday, March 06, 2010

An exhibit of new works by Fairmont State University School of Fine Arts faculty member Jennifer Boggess will be on display beginning Tuesday, March 9.

An opening reception is planned for 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, in the Brooks Gallery, located on the fourth floor of Wallman Hall on the main FSU campus. Admission to the reception and to the exhibit is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Mondays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For special viewing arrangements, contact Curator Marian Hollinger at (304) 367-4300.

In an excerpt from the catalogue essay for the exhibition, art historian Marian Hollinger writes the following:

"The large canvases are, in texture, luscious-a generally off-limits term in art history or criticism, but apt for this work. In contrast to the large pieces are the smaller, complicating, adjuncts of flowers and leaves and forest floor detritus, briefly glimpsed. These are the contrasts to the more conceptual qualities of the work as a whole. It is an installation in the truest sense of the word: one continuous work in the gallery; one created and limited space.

"There is restraint at every turn. The artist creates with a lavish brush, but she gives fewer works to observe than viewers wish. In the map-like areas of the canvas, she tantalizes us with the possibility of a place we might actually recognize, although she never defines it that specifically, then she gives us that tiny space which we ‘remember' from our own experiences in the natural world. As viewers, we have the distant and the close-up; the impersonal and the very personal. Another term discouraged in contemporary criticism is nostalgia, as if a yearning for something remembered but lost renders objects, works of art and the viewers' past obsolete, finished, passé; yet viewers will respond to Boggess' work with that fleeting yearning for an experience so small they might not quite recall where it took place. These are fragments of memory, and who does not respond to such fragments in a very powerful way?"